


to pursue the high stars on wings

by blanchtt



Category: Gravity (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 13:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanchtt/pseuds/blanchtt
Summary: She is seven when her father passes away, and thirty when her daughter is laid to rest. It never gets any easier.





	to pursue the high stars on wings

 

 

 

 

  

She jerks to consciousness sure the air’s cut off to her helmet, that her oxygen tank’s run out for the last time, sits up with a gasp and clutching at darkness, spinning and tethered to nothing just like before—

 

But it’s only the way she’s been sleeping, Ryan realizes, sucks in a deep and grateful breath, hard asleep and flat on her stomach, face against her pillow.

 

 _Apnea_. In the dark she kicks away the blankets that have become tangled around her legs, sits up and raises a hand to her face, cradles her cheek and rests her elbow against her knee because her heart is beating hard in her chest and no matter how exhausted, the last thing she wants is to put her head back down on that pillow. _Just apnea_.

 

Not the ISS. Not Tiangong.

 

_Thank God._

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

  

She locks her doors and draws the blinds and doesn’t leave unless she has to. It’s not healthy, she knows—anyone can see that. But she has a reason, Ryan tells herself, and refuses the interview requests from MSNBC, CNN, BBC, FOX, CCTV, NDTV, Al Jazeera, and a laundry list of other places trying to get exclusive interviews.

 

People want to make books, people want to make movies. She goes two weeks without looking at her cellphone and her email, the little red number on the app at the bottom of the phone growing every day because somehow that information leaks or is public knowledge.

 

She thinks of her debriefing, too, weeks ago now, of the psychiatrist and the worried looks from people once the shine and shock of simply _surviving_ left everyone.

 

The crash and burn is a slower kind, this time. She’s up at three in the morning because she’s fucked up her sleep schedule, knows she won’t get up before two in the afternoon tomorrow.

 

This has to be fixed, Ryan knows somewhere, somehow. Everything does, for her sanity. Sophia and ISS and now this, sitting in panties and an old sweater on the floor, mint-chip ice cream carton cold enough to feel like it’s burning her hand, and suddenly that sweetness on her tongue feels like something she doesn’t deserve but that she _wants_ , god damn it, wants one simple thing without everything going to _shit_ , and she’s sobbing and wiping her running nose with the sleeve of her overlarge sweater because there’s no one there to help her, just like before, just like up there—Sophia is gone and Matt is gone and Shariff is gone and here she is, sitting on her kitchen floor, sobbing into a carton of ice cream.

 

She finds her phone, swipes away the notifications for the one hundred and forty-three voicemails and six hundred and eighty-two emails and ninety-three text messages.

 

“Mom,” Ryan breathes, knows it’s been cruel not to call her since that first day but can’t help it. “How did you do it?”

 

She is seven when her father passes away, and thirty when her daughter is laid to rest. It never gets any easier.

 

“Day by day, baby. Day by day.”

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

She wakes up the next morning clear-headed, like that cry the night before has washed away everything dark and hard caked onto her since the debris trail changed everything.

 

 _As much time as you need_ , the hospital had told her. _Take as much time as you need_.

 

She lets Linda in HR know that she’ll be back and ready to work in a month, plugs in her phone to charge, and takes a good, hard look at her house.

 

There is a pile of unwashed things that needs to be sorted through and thrown in the wash, her bed to be made and the curtains to be drawn, plates to be picked up and the kitchen chairs tucked back under the table and windows to be opened.

 

Fresh air. Sunlight. Movement.

 

The answer to despair is action, Ryan remembers, hums that bit about the white dove and the sand and picks a pillow off the floor and puts it back where it belongs on her bed before leaving her room.

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

NASA’s tried to contact her—the disaster had obviously made the news around the word and anyone who pays any attention at all to what’s on their television or podcast or news app notifications knows her name, if only for a moment. It’s more than enough for her, though.

 

And that’s what she bets on, sits a few more days drinking tea and reading a book she’d meant to for months and texts her mother until the news vans outside dwindle away to almost nothing, a mix of catastrophes and miracles outside of Lake Zurich, Illinois, catching their ever-shifting attention.

 

(She’d given them her statement, as much as NASA’s doctors and attorneys had needed, not one sentence more, and left it at that.)

 

She touches down at Kangerlussuaq Airport, and the runway is small and cold and a few other people, other American tourists _oohing_ and _ahing_ , get off the plane with her. She hikes her backpack a little higher on her shoulder as they walk past her, toward the airport, and she reaches down to zip up the jacket she’d thrown on in the plane, lingers.

 

The hills are brown or white, summer coming to an end, the scent of ice from the glaciers and the sea strong and sharp. Far away are some buildings, colorful homes, and then nothing but blue, blue sky.

 

Yet somehow, she doesn’t feel alone.

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

The aurora is different from below, but no less impressive.

 

Sophia would love it, Ryan thinks, sits in bed with the down comforter wrapped around her shoulders and a mug of tea in her hands. It’s dark early and the aurora comes out, something she can see from her _bedroom window_ once she turns out the lights.

 

They’d been walking through WalMart and Sophia had seen stars, the kind you put up with tack on a kid’s bedroom ceiling and that drew energy from their well-lit surroundings to be able to glow white-green for a bit when the lights were finally turned out.

 

She remembers getting out the ladder, climbing up it, rickety, bracing herself with a hand against the ceiling, Sophia pointing where she wanted the stars put.

 

The conditions for this aurora, however, could not be further from each other.

 

It’s a bed and breakfast because they don’t do AirBnB here, and the little old lady who comes by to collect things for the wash and tidy the room when she’s out finds her still sitting in bed at ten in the morning the next day, somewhere between depressed and jetlagged, and comes back with tea.

 

The _next_ morning it’s tea and breakfast, which Ryan tries to turn down because she’s not here to be served, except Ida—and she learns the older woman is called—chides her in some language she doesn’t understand and puts the tray down on her lap and Ryan finds she’s forced to sit up, to be present, but doesn’t resent it.

 

She has a lot of people to thank, she knows, a lot of people and a lot of sacrifices that have culminated for now with her sitting here in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. There’s a list, and she goes down that list every day. Do it for them, a gesture. Don’t sit in the dark and feel sorry for yourself.

 

It’s easier to do here, to not feel sorry for herself where not moving means not eating, because at bed and breakfasts you eat with everyone else at the table or you don’t eat at all, because if you don’t eat at the table then you walk in the late-summer coolness to the store and struggle through a mixture of Danish and pantomiming to buy overpriced snacks.

 

Life goes on, bright outside when it has time to be and beautiful even when it’s dark.

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

There’s something plastered on a pole—puppies, Ryan can only guess from the picture of a sled dog and its litter, because she can read neither Danish nor the local language.

 

It’s an impulse buy.

 

She goes back to the bed and breakfast, to her room, logs into the wifi and replies to her mother, ignores the two hundred and eighty-three voicemails and one thousand and forty-nine emails, and researches.

 

She gets everything in order, fills out the paperwork, buys a carrier, and when she comes home three weeks later, the house dark and stale but most of the news vans gone, colder and clearer and calmer, she’s got Nuuk with her, too.

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

_The Siberian husky is alert, eager to please, and adaptable. Siberians are an extremely intelligent and independent breed. They can be very stubborn, owing to their original purpose, and they are easily bored. This independent and stubborn nature may at times challenge your ingenuity._

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

She sits down to a breakfast of tea and biscuits, Nuuk at her feet and gnawing on the toe of her slipper, little teeth sharp. She’s lost a running shoe or two to puppy chewing before she’d learned to put things out of reach.

 

She takes a biscuit, takes a bite and a sip of tea, lets the flavors meld like she did in Greenland as she looks out her kitchen window, at the leaves she needs to rake in the backyard and the empty, bare-branched trees and the overcast sky. She is thirteen miles from the cemetery and two thousand two-hundred and twenty miles from Kangerlussuaq and two hundred and fifty four miles from where the international space station will be rebuilt, someday, if people start caring about space again.

 

("I adopted a dog," Ryan says, and the therapist, _Joanne_ , smiles.)

 

There is only so long she can think of where she is not—not with her daughter, not with Matt, not with Shariff, not here or there or anywhere really except inside her own head, because Nuuk growls, which in reality is only a squeak, and Ryan lifts a foot, careful, and places the slipper on Nuuk lightly, playfully, feels him roll and bite down on it.

 

Now, for the first time in a very long time, she is here, alive when all the statistics say she shouldn’t be, and there is Nuuk to walk and lunch to make and later a Sunday drive to her mother’s to take, Nuuk in the front seat, and then work tomorrow, her first day back, and for now, Ryan thinks, that is a very good place to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
